My parent's PC just bought it and they've tasked me with finding a replacement for them. Their old one is an Asus with a Dual Core E5300 with 3GB ram and running Win XP. The new one I'm looking to get them sports an AMD A6-3650 APU with 4GB and Win 7 64-bit. It'll be built by NCIX as it's one of their pre-built systems. It's slightly more expensive than what my parents want to spend, but still acceptable.

Their budget is around $600 taxes in, though preferably lower. Any better suggestions out there or is what I've found as good as it gets? And would a Pentium Dual Core E5700 be noticeably faster than an APU? Please keep in mind that they do not play games at all, just surfing the web, check emails, but they do watch a lot of 1080p content, and will be buying a blu-ray drive as an upgrade later on.

That would be a fine build, but you may be able to save some money by building yourself if that is an option. The A6 would be faster than a e5700 and it has substantially better graphics as well.

Given their needs I would say an intel i3 2100 build would be your best bet. Other than that pretty much any amd processor will be fine. Either the i3 or any current AMD cpu (Athlon II/Phenom II/A4/A6/A8) will play HD on integrated graphic easily.